Silver, of course. The comment I was responding to made that point and other great points against salt as pay all of which I agree with.
But it also asserted that salt would not be good pay because the amount of salt in a week's pay would be more salt than you need. My point is that one specific point of their argument is wrong. That's why in my reply I quoted that specific part of their argument and nothing else.
You need a variety of things to get by: food, water, shelter, clothes, and fuel for a few examples.
Unless you have a job where your pay consists of the employer actually giving you all those things you are going to want to trade your pay with others for those things. If the physical form your weekly pay takes is something that you actually use then it needs to be more than you use in a week so you will have some left over to trade for those other things.
Hence their argument that 4 liters of salt a week is more than you could personally use fails as an argument against salt as pay.
You're talking about 5kg/wk or 20kg/mo of an unwieldy, difficult to manage and carry, and hard to trade bulk item (which also has to be carried by the army logisticians to hand out) vs a compact and easily tradable item that can easily be converted into the former, if need be.
While you're correct that it's not impossible, it's logically backwards enough for us to say it probably didn't happen. And, to corroborate that, there are no historical accounts of the former beyond some colloquial offhanded remarks. I've seen family mention they're bringing home the bread before, are they being paid in bread?
118g of silver which can easily be traded with just about anyone for anything.
Or 4800g of salt, which has a low liquidity and can be consumed (at ~20g max/day) or used to preserve foods.